Series 11:
Analyzing the limits between two dots.
Heart, Mind and Brain.
1998-2000
I quote again from the statement with which I
presented this exhibition at the United Nations exhibition
gallery, the New York University exhibitions gallery, the Skoto
Gallery and the Fish Tank Gallery, New York and Galería Juan
Manuel Lumbreras in Bilbao. And I do so because, in my attempt
to defi ne the work, I took all the time I needed to write it,
expressing myself with the most sincere, professional attitude I
was capable of. The exhibitions of this long series went by the
name of New York / Dots / I Am and I defi ned it as follows:
“The series I now present is a continuation of the
two previous ones, (Belonging and Difference). Filed in my
computer as “Dots” (later I would give it a more specific title:
Analyzing the limits between two dots and the latest results
as Heart, Mind and Brain) its computer beginnings, dated last
year, 1998, were literally 3 dots: a yellow one, a red one and a
blue one. All three colors at maximum saturation point.
Then I prepared three planes by placing dots spaced
out vertically and dots spaced out horizontally.
One consequence of this emptying, division or
atomization of the plane thus constructed was that the planes
themselves were transparent. One plane was yellow, another
red and the other blue.
Next I decided to connect up the three transparent
planes by moving them spatially forward and back to produce
a series of images that recalled a blend of everything that is so
characteristic of New York. It was in the transparencies, in the
contrasts and continual changes in the appearance and the
presence of Manhattan’s skyscrapers. It is a symbolic view of
what happens to them perpendicularly, at horizontal level, in
the streets of the city.
This series of images that represent for me the New
York reality of perpetual motion, blending and interaction, also
brought me, at an emotional and psychological level, face on
with what that capacity for openness means in terms of one’s
relations with others: transparent, mobile and interconnected,
but without the loss of one’s own identity.
To that end, I wanted “to see up close” what would
happen to the limits and between the limits of one dot with
another dot, from any of the compositions resulting from the
interconnection and movement of the transparent planes.
Literally, I increasingly “got into” each selected image
part, until I found myself in and with the line that “separates”
the identity of one color from the identity of another color,
perceiving, as a result of the need to amplify the dots under analysis,
new images actually contained in that encounter or collision of
one color with the other, of one light with another light.
Consciously differentiating these new images, I’ve
gone on fi ling them away as they came to light, under the titles
The work is a consequence of my encounter
with New York City; I called the series it belongs to Dots
and with I Am I tried to baptize, defi ne, the result of a long
artistic exploration that transcends its limits and moves into
metaphysical territory.
As a final conclusion on this transcendent exploration,
I would say it is the assimilation of the double separation or
psychological division–vertical and horizontal or spiritual
and human; the division that guarantees both IDENTITY
and UNIFICATION.
In other words: the assimilation of this double division
or separation is what enables us to be who we are, but in relation
to the totality. Mutation is possible if, in the vertical dimension,
there is, perpendicularly, the renunciation of the ego and in the
horizontal dimension the detailed differentiation or psychological
separation from the others, of all the others, emptying oneself,
and concluding with the need for projection in the other.
Though I like to call this complete process the
process of multiple divisions, the result is a very healthy feeling
of integration and communication.”
That’s what I wrote back in 1999. It is a source of –
very agreeable– surprise to fi nd that the subsequent exploration,
utterly different in style, reaffi rms the same concept, this time
applied to and worked on my own self.
And here I would like to draw a line, take five,
because the series explained from here on is the result of
applying the formal plastic exploration to myself, to the
artist herself. Indeed, I started out on this exploration with the
urge literally to “get into” the yellow painting of the series I
have just explained, entitled Mind.
Resolution of the Duality in one’s own person.
But now, my next move with the concept of Duality
was to work on it by exploring it in myself. I would be my own horizontal (vision-mind) and my own vertical (the
memory contained in the central nervous system: my physical
origins, desires, feelings, affections, intellectual capability,
spiritual concerns and so on). Helped along once again by
a psychoanalyst, Dr. Silvia Fustenberg, and my readings of
Krishnamurti and studies of Kundalini yoga and the chakras.
Horizontal: The need to empty the images
contained in the mind. I am a woman and my vision is
feminine.
I add below the statement for the exhibition held
in Chelsea called Sexuality and Mystique of the Feminine
explaining what my explorations for this series involved. And I
would like to stress how absolutely essential the work I did on
myself was for understanding how our eyes are conditioned
by our mind. Meaning that if the content we have in our mind
(education, culture, society, history) tells us that the color yellow,
for example, is black, then, yes, we’ll see black wherever yellow
comes up. The work on the following series was particularly
important to me in decoding the contents of my mind,
fundamentally dictated by our clearly masculine culture, to be
able to SEE with my own, feminine eyes unconditioned by the
ways of seeing and understanding of other interests remote
from mine, something that allows me fi rst to be myself by
eliminating from my life innumerable confl icts in my desire to
adapt to a world governed by the mandates of just one part of
it and to acquire the capacity to make my own life choices in
line with my personal sensitivity and intelligence.
Series 11 Gallery
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